Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday June 08, 2012 @07:50AM
from the funding-a-military-on-cat-pictures-alone dept.

Wowsers writes "In an effort to get ever more taxes for doing absolutely nothing, the United Nations will consider a European proposal to tax the internet based on data that gets sent. The proposal is designed to get money from large bandwidth users like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Netflix. Smaller companies that have high bandwidth requirements could be forced off the internet due to the taxes. 'The sender-pays framework would likely prompt U.S.-based Internet services to reject connections from users in developing countries, who would become unaffordably expensive to communicate with, predicts Robert Pepper, Cisco's vice president for global technology policy.'"

But the UN represents those people... and gives them a tiny minority of the votes. More than two thirds of the votes go to dictatorships and islamic hellholes, who amongst other things have established as a publicized and official goal to achieve "non-interference in internal affairs" of those dictatorships, which have of course historically covered war between them... they don't even think it's worth hiding their plain and obvious intentions.

The major intention of > 66% of the UN general assembly is to prevent any form of social or political advance in those countries.

You are not correct with your first sentence. The UN is not a government, does not have any citizens, and is not made up of an elected body. The UN is a panel of representatives from many countries. People already pay taxes to their countries, which in turn pays for the representatives that sit in the UN.

Money and assets that the UN owns, has been given as Gifts from various countries. As with above, this is already based on taxed income from citizens.

The whole representation issue aside. Since when has the UN been given authority to tax anything? Member states pay membership fees to finance the UN. I have never seen anything giving the UN body the authority to tax or tariff.

Except that this isn't coming from the politicians...the proposal is the brainchild of European telecom companies, who are looking to make a cash grab because their uses are getting to high bandwidth US sites.
Of course, I am amused how secret ITU treaty negotiations are bad when they negatively affect US companies, but how secret ACTA treaty negotiations are good when they protect US companies...

The tax is really about rent seeking by European telecom companies. They're having trouble competing with US companies like google, facebook, etc. on a level paying field, so they're hoping to make it too expensive for them to operate in other countries, allowing local clones to take over the market.

It seems only reasonable and fair that if they're going to tax sent Internet traffic, they should also tax sent tv and radio signals. Airwaves are an even more precious commodity than Internet bandwidth. It would at least be interesting to see how the media industry handles the conundrum of being on the same side as the big Internet companies that they seem to hate so much.

Why not tax the data sent across the LAN after all what is so special about internet data?What is so special about the LAN? What about data sent across internal busses? (after all USB could be compared to a network)So why not just tax CPU and memory access directly?You think I might have gone to far here?

Ftom their viewpoint it's perfectly logical.Many networks are state owned, and derive profits from long distance and international calls to balance their budgets and sudsidize local land lines.

All of s sudden, everyone starts using Skype and other video services to talk to each other, which eats into their profit margins. Some Canadian companies trief turning standard smartphone applications like Skype into value-added extras by offdring "Skype minutes.".

I'm just amazed they found a situation where the conservative canard "If you want less of something, tax it" is actually accurate and relevant. The internet should be subsidized, not taxed. You'll get it all back from an improved economy.

Of course, if they do try and implement this bullsh*t, I imagine the IT network guys will be back in demand. Private networks = no taxation (unless they're dumb enough to think they'll make it inside my house to install a meter on my LAN), and you can extend private networks fairly far...

Subsidizing something means you are taxing A and giving the money to B.

Now it's easy to pick candidates for that, but in the long run governments generally do a bad job at picking targets to tax, and targets to subsidize.

Part of the problem is that once a subsidy is put in place a constituency is created making it difficult to remove. In the US for example we subsidize tobacco growers. The very idea is of course abhorrent, but the political system is just not efficient.

Taxes on services will just shut out the small guys. The internet isn't just for commerce (or just porn), it's for a ton of other things. The principle of Net Neutrality ensures equal bandwidth for all. This tax would just require profitability, when many sites barely run even.

taxes, regulations, and bureaucratic nonsense destroy small and medium business, while giving government and large corporations total advantage, in fact they are working together. in this way, the big dogs get to buy up, or remove all the small fish.

and what do democrats and republicans do? they keep doing the same thing.

regulate and tax the real economy to death.

while ensuring their own survival and their corporate owners.

and if you think voting Democrat is going to address this, you're a fucking moron.

if you think MORE regulation, and more taxes, is going to fix this, you're a fucking moron.

Maybe that's the point. Shut out the FOSS community to do away with the competition. I'm sure many companies would be in favor of this. It's the whole pay more now in taxes, earn a lot more revenue later.

The UN do a lot, and some of it is actually useful. My beef with the UN, and with pretty much every government ever, is that they are always seeking to extend their span of control beyond what can be considered reasonable, in terms of power, influence, money and taxation. But in democratic nations, government is held in check at least to some degree by its constituents. The problem with the UN (and the EU for that matter) is that there is pretty much no control over what they do. UN-crats and Eurocrats are not held in check by the mandate of their voters, nor by voters in the countries they represent, but only by their colleagues. If a majority of them agrees to something that is opposed by all of the people they are supposed to represent, it will still pass. And what politician will say no to a chance to extend their influence, or an opportunity to take a big wet bite out of some fat cat overseas company's profits?

I really fail to see why the UN or Europe (or anyone else) should be entitled to part of Google's profits. Because they use our infrastructure to make money? For "the privilege of serving non-U.S. users"? That privilege works both ways, and I as a European am (and should be) grateful for the privilege of having so many useful US-based services at my fingertips. I might also add that this infrastructure has already been paid for, by my monthly subscription fees and plenty of public money.

Of course, saying that there is no good reason to tax Google is naïve... they will tax Google because they can, and come up with a good reason. Something along the lines of: "revenues from this internet tax will be applied towards building infrastructure in underdeveloped regions". Enter the Telcos, who are eager to get a nice cut of the job of building that infrastructure. Probably why their lobbyists came up with this proposal in the first place.

The reason Google, Netflix, and the like don't already pay enormous amounts of taxes is because old tax laws have been riddled with loopholes. Legislators try to fix this by adding new taxes, because it's easier to make new laws than revise old ones.

just that referring to them as "loopholes" makes it seem as if they were not intentionally created.

Often it's more a case that a tax exemption was created to cover a particular (reasonable) case but actually ends up including people who probably weren't intended to be included. It's a "loophole" when the non-intended beneficiaries use the tax exemption.

Of course, it also goes the other way. Extra taxes are created to catch some people who are "unnecessarily benefiting" but also end up hitting those who didn

Transferring your money to a different part of the same company? That shouldn't be taxed.

Your company's expenses were the same as its income, so you had no profits? That shouldn't be taxed.

Most of your profits are made in a country with low tax rates? That should be taxed, but only at the low rate.

Put them together with a hefty helping of accounting mayonnaise, and you have a Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich arrangement, a fully-legal loophole. Properly pulling it off requires at least four companies in three nations, so it's not something the average person can do in its entirety.

I personally, however, have made use of several of the provisions that make it work, so I won't claim I'm against any single part. I've transferred money to (and from) a business of my own, being happy not to face taxes on every transfer. I've moved money to a country with practically no taxes, because I was living there.

I read the article and the linked documents and the whole article seems to be trolling-- I think the Republica. they interviewed whispered sweet black helicopter nothings into cnet's ears and they decided to run with it.

Nowhere in the leaked documents does it say the UN will tax anything, or that member states are obliged to tax anything. All it basically says is that it wants to make sure the ITU regs affirm sovereign state's right to tax Internet traffic, and the rights of operators to negotiate their own

Indeed. The longer they prolong the medicine, the sicker the patient. The bailouts never should have happened. And austerity can't save your economy from a re-evaluation. Spending, of course, makes things worse.

While unlikely (hopefully) to pass, this sort if thing is exactly the reason the United States has been so reluctant to give up its nominal control of the Internet's architecture, nevermind why so many technologists are tacitly OK with the US's continued dominance.

The nations of the world, given equal weight, err toward censorship, and many regimes with UN votes have deeply vested interests in clamping down on the extraordinary free-for-all of information exchange that the current Internet provides. I for one want the United Nations to have no role at this level, and both hope and expect the US to refuse ratification should it actually come to pass.

And yet it's still the best option. No seriously though...I'm not saying this as "I AM AN AMURICAN" but moreso as...look at the shit the rest of your countries do with it. We have certainly fallen a long way, but the freedom of speech is still the most sacred right here and that affects things in a way that is very beneficial to the internet...even if we do fuck up sometimes. The thing is...our fuck ups seem small in comparison to the things that the nations of the UN would want to do. As the GP said...they tend to err toward censorship and the one thing I can still be proud of my country for is that they have an almost mindlessly addicted devotion to free speech.

I actually read the linked article and also skimmed through the leaked documents. I really can't find the things that the article is claiming are in there. From what I can make out, the leaked documents talk about taxes when billing telecommunication across borders (e.g., to prevent taxing services twice), like mobile phone roaming. How the article claims that this is about taxing large companies like Google and stuff is really beyond me. Can anybody point me to the part where it says that?

The whole article just seems inflammatory and some kind of anti-UN, anti-European reflex. I suppose mission accomplished, the knee-jerk reactions are already pouring in...

If the tax were at a very low rate (say a 1/10 penny per megabyte) it wouldn't affect most users much.
Suppose though that you taxed email at 1 cent per addressee? That wouldn't affect normal users much but would cost junk emailers enough that many untargeted junk emails would be stopped.
But administering a monitoring and collection system for internet usage taxes would be expensive. I don't think I wanted the government in the middle of every transaction.

I'd never pay a U.N. based tax, and I'd make damn sure no US politicians who were stupid enough to suggest that the US become a signatory of this proposed amendment ever gets reelected. I'm pretty sure most other US citizens feel the same way. We're quite sensitive about the whole taxation without representation thing.

That is a hugely expensive tax. Currently the cost to transmit a gigabyte is around 10 cents. There are 1,024 megs in a gig. So a 1/10 cent tax per meg would mean $1.02 in taxes per gig, or ten times the cost of service. Also, I understand that it used to be much more expensive to communicate (stamp and mail), and a 1 cent per email tax would be cheap for personal uses. But legitimate businesses who send hundreds of millions of requested emails (advertising to shopping club members, notification of bills re

An upside? You submit yourself to going along with this like cattle when there is no reason. All that it takes is for you to disagree. That is all. But you sit here, nod your head, and say, "Well, maybe it's not so bad," as you have your anus pummeled by politicians in every facet of life. YOU are the reason that stuff like this is ever passed.

And if my friend and I both have email servers set up at home and we want to send each other a message, how much does it cost and who tracks that? What if we use a different port? What if we encrypt the data and do it over port 443. Is it delivery to port 25 that's taxed? If email is taxed, then all my friends drop email and move to Facebook messaging (is that taxed?). I'd probably set up a jabber server for good friends and family.

This isn't the first time that a U.N. agency will consider the idea of Internet taxes.
In 1999, a report from the United Nations Development Program proposed Internet e-mail taxes to help developing nations, suggesting that an appropriate amount would be the equivalent of one penny on every 100 e-mails that an individual might send. But the agency backed away from the idea a few days later.

They also propose being funded through taxes on currency exchange and international airfare, neither of which has come to pass. But they keep trying, because they know they only have to succeed once, whereas those who don't want to live under a world government with teeth have to succeed every time.

If you tax someone, it should be the consumers of data. Google sends no data unless the consumer requests it. Of course, the consumers already pay for their bandwidth. (which is why I think charging for tethering is a complete ripoff. That is double charging for the bandwidth already paid for)

While I understand that telcos are money-grubbing little fuckers who would sell their own family for a plug nickel, I am honestly baffled at how frequently this 'zOMG high-bandwidth sites are terrifying parasites who are getting a free ride!!!' comes up, and even seems to be treated as reasonable.

It's not hard: For Company A and Customer B to exchange data across the magic intertubes, Company A is paying(probably rather a lot, albeit at favorable per-megabyte rates) for upstream bandwidth and Customer B is paying (probably rather less; but at usurious per-megabyte rates) for downstream bandwidth. There isn't any magic free-riding going on. In fact, by offering attractive and data-heavy services, Company A is doing ISPs a favor; by making their otherwise rather unexciting product highly desirable to Customer B.

I can understand that there might be occasional spats about peering between the big backbone guys; but the claim that internet companies are somehow 'free-riding' on the poor, downtrodden ISPs is laughably absurd. They certainly don't get their upstream pipes for free, and their customers definitely pay for the connection that they use to download. I have to wonder what color the sky is in the world of ISPs who have the temerity to attack their greatest benefactors, the people who provide stuff that the public wants so much that they'll buy bandwidth to get it....

If the REcord companies claim that song is worth trillions in a law suit, ASK them where the Back taxes are on those Trillions. Software,Music,Movies,Books. Tax the stated "value" of them.

This fixes two things. 1 - Added revenue for the EU. 2 - stops ridiculousness in claims for Copyright Infringement. The company cant dare to claim $6500.00 per share of a song if they will be taxed at the new rate for it. Suddenly it fixes a legal and a financial problem overnight. They can stop paying Taxes on a piece of I.P. as soon as they release it as public domain. So old abandonware games, Old music music and old movies, will get released and not horded for no reason.

The United Nations is not a government and does not have the ability to levy taxes even if they wanted to. The debate about taxes happened in a U.N. forum, but the U.N. itself would have no role in collecting taxes. It would be the U.S. and European countries that would collect and keep the money.

The problem is who pays the middle man who connects you and Facebook?In particular, international cables aren't exactly cheap, and someone has to foot the bill.

Up until now, the problem has been amiably solved by the ISPs and hosting providers billing you extra to pay their carriers, who in turn enter peering agreements and pay each other based on how much data flows. This really only works well when there is a bidirectional flow - in some cases where data mainly flows one way, this becomes a bit drain on one end and a money drain on the other. Instead of having to cut the line as unprofitable, and leave customers without a connection, the ISPs look for alternative solutions.

An internet tax might not be the best idea, but there may be something to this being a social problem -- a resource that's now almost as important as food, housing and water might (from a European perspective) need some kind of legislation to ensure availability even for those who live at the wrong end of the water tube. How this is ensured, without it just being an excuse to fatten telco execs and shareholders, is a problem. I'm quite sure that the proposed bit tax is one of the worst ways to try to fix this.

Enforced peering might be a better solution, but some of the biggest players are going to do what they can to stop that, because it cuts into their revenue stream and promotes competition by rewarding small players instead of monopolies and oligopolies.

The problem is who pays the middle man who connects you and Facebook?In particular, international cables aren't exactly cheap, and someone has to foot the bill.

Someone already does. When the traffics are materially different -- which happens frequently -- peering agreements put a price tag on the difference. This holds for voice and data. Someone gets charged for it, directly if or indirectly.

There is no such thing as a money drain in this arena: the costs are passed down to hosts and end-users, and the pipes as a whole, including international pipes, are widely profitable...

I'd be very hard pressed to shed a tear for US and EU oligopoles who are fighting their co

The problem is who pays the middle man who connects you and Facebook? In particular, international cables aren't exactly cheap, and someone has to foot the bill.

Well I'd assume that the money that my ISP pays to the backbone provider would go towards the cost of the international cables. There are communication tariff agreements that are made at that level that dictate how much money should go to which carrier. It's similar to the telecom agreements that regulate voice traffic across different telephone com

"isnt it time the europeans started another war with each other?" -> It appears that someone is trying to start a war, and bankrupting the whole of Europe is how they plan to do it. Economic wars being a variant of warfare, of course. The sad part being, its their own that are pissing away their money, but it's not them who will pay the price if / when a real war breaks out.